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Posted on by Michael E. Lawrence

Michael Procter’s Transcription of Alma Redemptoris Mater

In my programming, I try to do a good portion of new music. I think it’s important, not least because for certain audiences it brings a whole world to life that they otherwise wouldn’t know. Some years ago, radio stations were swamped with phone calls when they played Henryck Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. How many of them were turned on to classical music because of that experience? Similarly, one of my singers tells me that as she was listening to the recording of our performance of Wilko Brouwers’s Missa Alme Pater, her husband, a folk singer not particularly interested in “serious” music (I hate that term; anyone have a better one?), was intrigued. New music is a gateway.

Maybe I’m off my rocker but I feel like looking at old music in new ways is also related to this approach. It keeps us from using music as a mere mood-setter, as ear candy. It isn’t just the sacro-pop crowd that would have it this way, either. The entertainment mentality reaches into every ideology; but we ought to be artists in the strictest and best sense of that term.
To look at an old song in a new way is to work to make a piece of art even better, to try to come closer to its ideal form. Perhaps the genre of chant offers a particularly broad space for this, owing to the indefinite nature of the early manuscripts. Efforts like the Solesmes method have given the chant repertoire a great deal of advantageous stability, but when the cards are on the table I insist on treating chant as music and not cramming it into a school-shaped box. And so, when someone presents a new realization of a chant, I give it a serious look.
Using the Hartker manuscript and the Worcester Antiphonale, Michael Procter has given us a particularly gorgeous reconsideration of the solemn tone of Alma Redemptoris Mater, the Marian antiphon for Advent and Christmastide. I make an effort to use this several times a year. Not only is the melody different—several of the cadences are spine-tingling and the lines are more florid—but the rhythms have a surprising agility. Several figures involving the quilisma lack the preceding dotted punctum that we’re so accustomed to seeing. (I’m assuming this isn’t a misprint.) It brings a completely different energy to the line, a playfulness that is fitting for the subject matter of the text.
If your schola can handle the standard chant repertoire, it can handle this little gem from Michael Procter. Some may think that such efforts introduce needless controversy, but it seems to me that a healthy appreciation of these efforts can be maintained if everyone holds just a small amount of uncertainty about it. This is not to say that scholarship should be discarded in favor of whim, but for me the foremost consideration should be beauty, and in this regard Michael Procter certainly succeeds.
Posted on by Mr. C

The Eleventh Hour

In my four decades of directing music within the Church I’ve found that most thriving and viable music “ministries” offer some sort of pre-Midnight Mass performance. The most common is the devotional format of the service of Nine Lessons and Carols, modeled after the classic English order fashioned circa 1880. However, any number of variations on that service, or a simple concert that features prominent large works, or smaller anthems/motets in alternation with congregational carol-singing may even be more common than the Lessons format. Over the two decades at our current parish, we have offered a separate concert event prior to Christmas that generally consists of a major cantata or large work, sometimes with solos, instrumental chamber works, organ compositions and the like interspersed within that model. We have also had years where the concert did not feature a large work or cantata, but had a thematic concept overarching a number of small choral pieces. Such themes included cultural components, styles and periods, specific composers or arrangers, traditional versus modern eras, etc. For example, in 2010 I programmed a concert featuring the works of American Catholic composers of the Victorian era to compliment the 150th anniversary of our parish’s founding. That was a bit of a challenge to find significant counterparts to Peloquin from 1850 besides RoSewig et al, so I also tagged along some villancicos known to the missions in California at the time and a spiritual also sung in the era of the Civil War according to Higginson’s bibliography.
This last year we held our seasonal concert early, which featured Vivaldi’s GLORIA and the Bach MAGNIFICAT. It was a lovely, greatly attended event done well, but we decided initially not to repeat it in the eleventh hour prior to Midnight Mass for a number of sound reasons. Happily, our choir core has been together for 18 years, so once we were free of rehearsals for the “masterworks” concert we were able to prepare well about eight/nine pieces for the pre-Midnight portion of Christmas Eve.

My question to other choirmasters/directors: when you choose to do a “mixed bag” sort of pre-concert before Mass, whether Lessons-based or not, what criteria do you use, if any, that informs your repertoire choices? Do you place restrictions that are related or overlap from our “Catholic ethos” of chant/polyphony preference (even if carried through genetics to modern composers from Saint-Saens to Allen or McMillan)? Or do you allow some measure of “letting one’s hair down” and admit pieces that don’t have the catholic pedigree firmly in place? As mentioned, that could be spirituals, or gospel-infused arrangements and pieces (by great arrangers like Hogan, Hayes, Dillworth, Thomas), or other inculturated traditions such as Advent or Nativity villancicos, or carols from Hispanic traditions, Polish traditions and such, or generic but worthy new compositions by lower-tiered composers such as Leavitt, Courtney, Rutter, Chris Rice, Hillsongs or Culbreth ;-)?
I suppose what I’m asking amouts to whether such “devotional” or “inspirational” material that you, as choirmaster, deem to be worthy of public performance within the confines of your church building ought to be discerned also according to the tenets that we adhere to for actual worship at liturgy?
Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

English Propers for Christmas Day

I’m particularly pleased with these because the beautifully echo the Gregorian.

(I won’t be posting the midnight Mass or Mass at dawn, but you can find them all at the Watershed youtube site)

One final note: I just received word that the new printing of the Simple English Propers is ready and being shipped to Amazon on Monday. That means it will be available after the first of the year. Thank you for your patience!